"[Behind Howard's stories] lurks a dark poetry and the timeless truth of dreams." ~ Robert Bloch

Robert Bloch, one of Howard's contemporaries, suggested in his first letter to Weird Tales that even Conan wasn't that much shakes. Bloch's idea was that Conan should be banished to the outer darkness where he could use his sword to cut out paper dolls. Needless to say, this suggestion did not go over well with the marching hordes of Conan fans; they probably would have lynched poor Bob Bloch on the spot, had they caught up with him back there in Milwaukee." ~ Stephen King, Danse Macabre.

stephen king needs broken: i read part of this quote out of context on a delrey cover and thought king liked howard...

in a review of Michel Houellebecq's essay "H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life" published in the Los Angeles Times, April 17, 2005, Stephen King implies that Howard did not work at his craft and was merely pastichingLovecraft.[188] King described his disapproval of the sword and sorcery genre, and superheroes, in his book on writing Danse Macabre: "[It] is not fantasy at its lowest, but it still has a pretty tacky feel. ... Sword and sorcery novels and stories are tales of power for the powerless. The fellow who is afraid of being rousted by those young punks who hang around his bus stop can go home at night and imagine himself wielding a sword, his potbelly miraculously gone, his slack muscles magically transmuted into those "iron thews" which have been sung and storied in the pulps for the last fifty years."[190] On Howard in particular, he wrote, "Howard overcame the limitations of his puerile material by the force and fury of his writing and by his imagination, which was powerful beyond his hero Conan's wildest dreams of power. In his best work, (Howard's writing seems so highly charged with energy that it nearly gives off sparks. Stories such as 'The People of the Black Circle' glow with the fierce and eldritch light of his frenzied intensity.) At his best, Howard was the Thomas Wolfe of fantasy, and most of his Conan tales seem to almost fall over themselves in their need to get out. Yet his other work was either unremarkable or just abysmal."[190]